France has also voiced its keeness to help develop the proposed 330 km-long line – according to news reports, Singapore transport minister Lui Tuck Yew said last week that French companies have indicated their interest in having Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV) operating on the planned high-speed rail project between Singapore and Malaysia.

Lui however added that the project was not yet at a point where any decisions about the best contenders could be made, and that neither Singapore nor Malaysia is at the stage of selecting which train system or company to go with. Both countries will first need to discuss the financial, regulatory, structural and operational issues on a deeper basis and in a systematic manner.

“Before we decide on the eventual system, we have to jointly decide it. We have to jointly decide on the selection of tenderers and the system itself. But I think that will come much later, because there are many structural issues that we have to decide on first,” Lui told reporters last week in France.

“It’s actually quite a complicated project, with many different permutations and many different possibilities. So we have to step through this systematically with the Malaysians, get an agreement before we can even put out a tender into the market,” he said, adding that at present, all Singapore was doing was attempting to learn as much as it could about all the possible systems that would fit the bill.

Anthony Lim believes that nothing is better than a good smoke and a car with character, with good handling aspects being top of the prize heap. Having spent more than a decade and a half with an English tabloid daily never being able to grasp the meaning of brevity or being succinct, he wags his tail furiously at the idea of waffling - in greater detail - about cars and all their intrinsic peculiarities here.